Hello from VMS Bootcamp!

A big part of the Bootcamp is “VMS Magic”. Anyone can come up and give a story about anything related to VMS. The best story wins a prize — the first-place winner this year showed how he booted VMS on a palmtop computer.

But this post is about Ron Kaledas of CareTech Solutions. He works in a typical environment — VMS, Linux, Windows. At every opportunity, he pointed out the benefits of OpenVMS. His cluster had been up for 5 years continuously without interruption.

Clustered VMS systems can be upgraded one at a time in a “rolling reboot” without affecting the cluster as a whole. Hard to believe that this technology has been available for over 20 years, and still isn’t available on any other platform.

Anyway, his part of the data center was scheduled for a complete shutdown to upgrade the un-interruptible power supply (UPS). But he wanted to keep his cluster alive through the shutdown.

So, he downloaded PersonalAlpha, a free version of the CHARON-Alpha emulator. He loaded it on a laptop, installed VMS, joined the cluster, and shut down all the other nodes.

After an hour or so, the power was restored, and he started the other systems back up. He then had his laptop exit the cluster without impacting any users.

His uptime? 5+ years and counting!

Author: Stan

I was born in Ohio, and have lived most of my life here. I was into technology from an early age: math, chemistry, physics, electronics, amateur radio, flying, scuba diving. My business is an extension of my techological interests. I love what I do.